Amazon Ebook Publishing Optimisation: Using Tags

If you’ve already began your Amazon eBook publishing journey by publishing your first Amazon Kindle book, you’ll be familiar with the task of adding “tags” when uploading your e-book file in your Amazon KDP dashboard. These tags are effectively what are called “keywords“.

Do you know what these tags do?

In case you don’t, tags help tell Amazon’s search engine about your book and the relevancy your book has to certain topics that readers/shoppers are searching for.

Here’s an example.

A science fiction author begins the process of publishing for Kindle. He enters tags into his Amazon KDP dashboard for the first time. He enters tags which make sense to him such as; “science“, “fiction” and “space“.

Makes sense right? Well no, this isn’t going to help this author. Here’s why.

These tags are too broad. The tags “science” and “fiction” don’t give Amazon’s search engine enough specificity. The word “science” could mean a nonfiction topic, not science fiction novels. The word “fiction” includes every fiction book on Amazon and the word “space” could also refer to nonfiction.

Inevitably, this author’s book gets lost as Amazon doesn’t know how to categorise this book. So when shoppers are searching the Amazon bookshelves by typing in keywords his book is invisible.

The lesson for you here is that you need to be specific and target your book’s tags more thoughtfully. Let’s have another example.

For this science fiction author it’s going to be more effective to be specific with tags. Here’s some suggestions I’d recommend to this author.

science fiction adventure

science fiction and fantasy

science fiction dystopian

Look how specific these tags are, there’s no question now that Amazon’s search engine will not confuse this book with nonfiction books. It’s clearly a science fiction novel. Not only that, we’re drilling down even further into the science fiction category with the third keyword tag “science fiction dystopian“.

So now when Amazon buyers are typing keywords (and there are thousands!) around their favourite genre “science fiction“, this science fiction author’s book is going to have more visibility than with the previous tags.

Taking Amazon keywords to the next level

There’s another, more advanced step to implement when Amazon eBook publishing, by using these tags to increase your book’s “discover-ability” in Amazon’s search engine, which I’ll cover in an upcoming article. Stay tuned.

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